Libya the morning after: inside Gaddafi's abandoned compound

On the first anniversary of Muammar Gaddafi's death, Guardian journalists Luke Harding and Martin Chulov trace the country's chaotic transition from dictatorship to fledgling democracy in a
new ebook.
In this extract, written after Gaddafi fled Tripoli, Luke Harding investigates the regime's empty offices

Tripoli, 2011. The morning following the mortar attack – August 24 – it was safe enough to venture out into the streets. I headed to the office of Libya's government. A rebel showed me inside; it was as if the senior members of Gaddafi's government had just popped out for lunch. In the meeting room, someone had left a briefcase behind on the veneered oval table. A green sign in Arabic proclaimed: "Dr Al-Baghdadi Ali Al-Mahmoudi, prime minister of Libya."

Next to the now ghostly chair were places for the prime minister's colleagues: finance, education, the environment and fisheries. In an adjacent room the air conditioning softly hummed. Portraits of Libya's vanished dictator still hung on the walls. I discovered official papers that told their own story – petitions, a wedding invite, and a Libya investment report by Ernst & Young ("Quality In Everything We Do"). It wasn't clear which minister had been perusing it. But the papers spoke of how rapidly Libya had reintegrated itself with the western commercial world, after the country's emergence from isolation and sanctions.

In Al-Mahmoudi's private office I pilfered copies of secret US diplomatic cables concerning Libya, leaked in December 2010 by WikiLeaks, and seen by some as a catalyst for the Arab uprisings. The cables referenced the "voluptuous blonde" Ukrainian nurse who accompanied Gaddafi everywhere.

At the time Gaddafi had dismissed the US state department reports as lies. But here they were, meticulously annotated into Arabic.

The feelings of ordinary Libyans towards the Gaddafi regime and its missing representatives was best summed up by two pieces of graffiti written on the wall outside. One read: "To hell with Gaddafi." The other: "Down with frizzy head."

The rebels may have dethroned Gaddafi. But the price had been high. I toured Tripoli's Italian-built central hospital, where doctors hadn't had time to tally up the dead. Corpses lay dumped next to the entrance in a stinking side-room. Several dozen fighters were killed in the ferocious battle for Bab al-Aziziya, Gaddafi's complex. Others with serious head and abdominal wounds slumbered in the intensive care unit; bandaged and gravely ill. The room was silent but for a rhythmic plink-plunking.

Dr El-Mahdi, the hospital's orthopedic consultant, told me that Libyans supported Nato's decision to bomb government targets. They hadn't been duped by anti-western state propaganda: "I think they [the allies] prevented Benghazi from eradication," he said. Libya's revolution was a continuation of earlier ones, said the doctor. "This started from eastern Europe and then spread to the Balkans. Now it comes to our world. It will carry on through Africa and some other countries with dictators."

At Tripoli's secret police headquarters nobody had turned up for work. Nor had anyone clocked in at the foreign ministry – a charming building on Tripoli's seafront, built in the 1960s by King Idris, the monarch whom Gaddafi deposed in September 1969 in a bloodless coup. I found the doors to the European Union section locked. A rebel tried unsuccessfully to prise a gold-framed portrait of Libya's former leader from the wall. Frustrated, he instead smashed the glass.

A short walk from the foreign ministry was the residence of Britain's ambassador in Libya, a building trashed and looted in March 2011 while Gaddafi's soldiers looked on. The ornate metal gate was unlocked. I wandered inside. The art deco structure was now a spectacularly gutted ruin. Fire had completely razed the ground floor, debris covered the sweeping marble staircase. All that was left of Her Majesty's billiard table was a charred frame. Pieces of Minton bone china and the bottom of a Whittard teapot lay next to a ravaged dishwasher.

Osama Mohamad, a marine scientist whose son had witnessed the destruction, showed me around. He said that Gaddafi's officials had encouraged locals to destroy and rob the property. Osama said he was disappointed by Britain's close relationship with Gaddafi, and by the invitation to Libya's ambassador – subsequently withdrawn – to attend Prince William's wedding. "Gaddafi's been a dictator for 42 years. I don't accept it. I accept it from Italy but not from Britain," he said. He added: "Tony Blair is an adviser to Gaddafi. It's strange."

In the sunny courtyard were the remains of four burned-out cars. Round the back the ambassador's swimming pool was now an algae-infested pond. Vandals had smashed up the changing rooms – hurling a loo seat on the floor. A sign still read: "Please shower before entering the pool." A second world war memorial to British troops who died fighting in the western desert against Rommel's Germans lay smashed in small chunks.

Britain's ambassador Richard Northern and his family had clearly left in a hurry. The upstairs rooms were filled with papers he had been unable to take, as well as an unread copy of Martin Amis's novel The Information. The Tripoli Post was discarded on the floor, together with a Libya map (which I liberated) and "Mastering Arabic". A typed page left by one long-departed ambassador offered helpful hints on local customs. It lamented: "The only real hardship is the total absence of a decent glass of wine in the entire British embassy, once the Christmas ration is finished."

There was also a menu from a dinner given in honour of Charles Clarke – a sign of Britain's dubiously warm relations with Tripoli under the last British Labour government. Clarke, then home secretary, enjoyed spiced pumpkin soup with "pan-friend Dentishi" and "North African lamb with couscous and mixed vegetables". The wine situation had clearly improved in recent years: with the then Labour minister served a bottle of Chablis grand cru, as well as coffee and truffles. For most of Tripoli's residents, such opulence was unthinkable. Poverty was one of the key factors behind Libya's "February 17" revolution, in a country with enormous oil and gas reserves – in fact, the largest proven oil reserves on the African continent, with a whopping 43.6 billion barrels.

At one rebel checkpoint I met a group of volunteers sitting on a superior black leather sofa. They had borrowed it from a nearby flat and parked it on the pavement. The rebels had also helped themselves to a coffee table.

"In our home we didn't have anything like this," Moaied al-Nadami, 30, explained, pointing to his new suite. "Gaddafi has many expensive things. He spent our money on parties and buying guns." Al-Nadami said he worked as a dentist and lab technician. He showed off a 10mm revolver he had seized from Gaddafi's compound. "I was there. We found many, many guns," he said.

But while most rebels were friendly, some were not. In a warren of alleys near Gaddafi's compound one excited group demanded to see my ID and passport. The rebels were suspicious, hostile, and armed; they claimed they were looking for informers and traitors spying for Gaddafi's regime. "How do we know you are not spies?" one asked. In the days that followed – with Gaddafi toppled, but still alive and in hiding – his ruined complex became Libya's premier tourist attraction.

The sprawling Bab al-Aziziya compound filled with cars as ordinary Libyans got their first opportunity to peer inside it. The main ceremonial building – stormed by the rebels and a bombed out wreck – echoed with crazy gunfire. Smiling locals took snaps on their mobile phones, or peered from the balcony at Tripoli's shimmering skyline. By the following summer, the compound would become an unofficial municipal rubbish dump, with a few intrepid squatters taking up residence in the former army mess.

Just up a grassy knoll I joined other visitors to the discrete villa belonging to Saif al-Islam, who would later be captured in the desert by Zintani rebels. Dozens wandered in through the concealed entrance: two green doors led to a shady garden of figs and lime trees. Fires still burned. In one ravaged bedroom a man knocked on the wall. "Are you there, Gaddafi?" he joked.

"I'm taking photos to show to my brothers and family still in Tunisia," Salah Ermih explained, recording the ransacked interior on his mobile phone. Ermih, a surgeon, said he had dashed out from his overworked hospital to have a look. He added: "A month ago I knew this would happen. Gaddafi was getting weaker and weaker." What would happen to Libya now? "We should be a democracy. But in our own way."

The villa spoke of a luxuriously European lifestyle – a state-of-the-art kitchen, a large store cupboard smelling pungently of looted spices, and a collection of videos. A DVD of the Hollywood film Open Season sat among the debris; on the floor of Saif's study was the cover from a January issue of The Economist. It read: "The Eurocrisis, Time for Plan B". Christmas cards addressed to Saif were scattered about.

Some of those who turned up had brought their kids. Children leant through the back windows of saloon cars, waving V-signs. One of the most remarkable aspects of Gaddafi's compound was its sheer size: office and residential buildings dotted around an enormous four-kilometre grassy space, a city within a city. A thick forbidding wall sealed off the compound from ordinary citizens. It housed senior regime officials and the government's formidable security apparatus.

Another newly popular attraction were the tunnels – a network of subterranean passages. Locals queued up to go inside via a small manhole and down a green ladder outside the building used by Gaddafi to show off American cruise missiles. The most accessible complex was something of a disappointment – though you could pop up pleasingly several hundred meters away, next to Saif al-Islam's grassy residence.

There were few clues to where Gaddafi might be hiding. His regime had cynically built a children's fairground above the main tunnel entrance. The cups and saucers from one of the rides were intact, but the teapot had toppled over. The complex was strewn with the remnants of battle: bullets, crates used for mortars, expensive leather sofas stacked up in a lavish reception room as an improvised defensive wall, a dead kitten.

"Gaddafi is mafia! Gaddafi is Al Pacino!" cried Omar Naaji as he and a group of rebels combed through a suite of trashed regime offices. A red-carpeted staircase led to an upper storey containing a barred interrogation area. "This is where lots of people were arrested," Naaji said, showing off a security protocol detailing the names of those rounded up. "My brother was held here two years ago. I've come to have a look," Walid Shara, 27, from Misrata, added.

A large man burst into the office, incredulous he had penetrated into the heart of Gaddafi's fallen empire. "Allahu Akbar!" he shouted, dancing up and down. Minutes later he was frantically carrying box-files containing prisoner details to his car. "I'm not a thief. I'm going to give these to Al-Jazeera," he insisted. "I'm very happy. Gaddafi is finished."